


To Love and to Hold

by Kalliria



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Reincarnation, Resurrection, Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2018-12-12 11:01:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11735688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalliria/pseuds/Kalliria
Summary: Bucky has lived many lives, falling in love with the same woman all over again every time. But when he rejects her, the well-oiled machine is thrown apart. Loving someone forever has never felt so long.





	1. To Love and to Hold

**Author's Note:**

> More on my tumblr: https://kalliria.tumblr.com/

He meets her for the first time in 1434. She is walking through the village, a basket full of bread and pastries between her arms. Men and women alike stop as she goes, dazed by the magnificence of her smile. Bucky’s just passing through, looking for work, but from the moment he sees her, he knows he’ll never leave. Not unless she leaves with him.

So Bucky stays. The blacksmith, a stoic beast of a man, likes him enough to offer him a job and a place to sleep in his barn. Soon, Bucky learns the girl’s name. He can’t bring himself to talk to her so he pesters the villagers for information. What kind of flowers does she like? Is there a boy she fancies? Does she want to marry?

He watches from afar as man after man tries his chance and is rejected, with the firm kindness that she does so well. A year passes, and Bucky is still here. He has grown to love the village, the surrounding woods and the gentle river that flows through them. He enjoys walking there, every morning for an hour or two, as the sun rises above the trees. One day, he is surprised to see her there, the woman he has loved in silence for months. She is standing in the middle of the path, a mischievous smile on her face.

‘Hello,’ she says and her voice is sweeter than he ever imagined.

He can’t talk, from fear his voice would break. Instead, he nods, struggling to look her in the eyes.

‘I am a patient woman,’ she continues. ‘My father used to say there was nothing a man couldn’t accomplish if he has both patience and dedication. He taught me to have both.’

‘He sounds like a wise man,’ Bucky manages to say. His heart is hammering in his chest and his palms are sweaty against the rough material of his pants.

‘He was. Ever since he passed, God bless his soul, I have tried to live by his words and counsel. And yet, it seems my father was wrong. I have waited patiently for my heart’s desire, but have not yet obtained it. What must I do more?’

She is smiling still, but there is a flame in her eyes, bright and dangerous, as she looks at him. He doesn’t understand what she wants from him, and that scares him. He has never been fond of mysteries, of the unexpected. It never turned out well.

‘I- I don’t know what you want, miss,’ he stammers. ‘But if I can help, I will.’

She takes a step towards him, and his face heats up as if she was the sun.

‘You’re the only one who can, James.’

When Bucky hears his name fall from her lips, he knows he’ll never want to hear it another way again. His heart is hammering in his chest and Bucky starts to believe his love for her may kill him.

‘I don’t understand.’

She sighs and her smile fades into a look of utter frustration.

‘For Heaven’s sake, how dense can you be?’ she half-yells. ‘A year I have waited for your proposal, while men threw themselves at my feet! Do you know how awful it was, to refuse them all? Good, kind men who would have loved me with all their hearts. I’m young, but I won’t be for much longer. What are you waiting for? A written note from God himself?’

Bucky can’t move. He can barely breathe. His head is screaming at him to do something, say something. But his heart is too scared this isn’t real; too scared he’ll wake up in his bed, alone as always, and realize this was a dream.

‘James,’ she begs. Her voice breaks and he is stunned at the vulnerability on her face, now that the anger has passed. She seems scared, and it’s the realization that she thinks he will reject her that snaps him out of his daze.

He drops to one knee in the dirt and her breath hitches. He doesn’t know how to ask for someone’s hand. He’s never done it before, and his father died long before Bucky thought to ask him. He reaches out and takes her hand as gently as he can, trying to ignore the way his skin ignites at the touch.

‘I have loved you from the moment I saw you,’ he says, his voice breaking on every word. ‘And if you allow it, I will keep loving you as long as there is breath in my lungs and blood in my veins. I cannot promise you a perfect life. I have no money, no home, no family. But I can promise you I will give you everything I own and everything I am, if it makes you happy.’

He doesn’t ask her to marry him, because he doesn’t need to. He sees it in her eyes, the deafening “yes”. The focus of his world, the centre of his universe, it all shifts to her. He knows, there and then, that he will love her forever.

He doesn’t realize how long forever is; doesn’t realize the pain that will drag him into alcoholism and depression when she dies from a devastating fever, barely a year after their marriage. There is nothing left for him. No children, no keepsakes, just a few golden memories. It’s not enough. It’s never enough. Bucky dies a sad, lonely man at twenty-two years old: he drank himself to death. His last thought was of her smile, and relief as the pain finally stops.

* * *

That is, until his eyes open again in 1456. A new-born named James Eccleston, screaming in his mother’s arms as he is brought into the world.

The memories come back slowly. Dreams of wide smiles and sharp laughter as a child. A sketch of her face as his professor drones on. A name, escaping from his lips as his hand snakes beneath the sheets at night. By the time he has reached adulthood, a young and daring man wreaking havoc in the streets of London, the memories accompany him everywhere he goes. He never tells anyone about them but keeps them safe in a dark corner of his heart. He doesn’t think much of them, after all.

That is, until he sees the girl he has dreamed about for years in church, on a bright Sunday morning. She is sitting on the other side of the aisle, attentive to the priest’s words. Bucky doesn’t remember anything from that day, save for the way the light shone on her cheeks and the movement of her hands as she played with the bow of her hat absentmindedly.

He isn’t a pious man, far from it. Believing in God is a requirement of society, one that he accepts without much thought. But after that day, he looks at the world with different eyes. What could his dreams be, if not a gift from the Lord?

He marries her three months later and London stares in wonder at the love that radiates between the two young souls. Their first baby is born in spring, a pink little thing full of smiles and laughter. More come after the first one and soon enough, their home is filled with yells and bare feet running on the wooden floor. Bucky adores all his children, but he enjoys the company of his youngest daughter the most. He loves the cleverness in her eyes and the way she sees the world, with hope and wonder.

Bucky once asks his wife if she ever had dreams of him, as a child. She laughs. She thinks he’s joking, and he doesn’t insist. He never speaks of his visions again.

They grow old. Their love is not perfect, and there are times in which Bucky wishes he had never loved her, never married her, never even laid his eyes upon her. Her flaws are plentiful, and years of marriage have taught her exactly how to infuriate him.

But despite the fights, the pain and the regrets, he knows from the bottom of his heart she is the best thing that ever happened to him. And when she dies, at the old age of seventy-three, everything that was good in the world turns to ashes. He sees nothing but grey. It doesn’t take him long to join her in the afterlife, and he greets death like an old friend.

* * *

He is born once again in 1531.His memories of her are there yet again, more frequent, more violent. The death of the woman he loves weighs heavily on him and he grows up sad and withdrawn. His parents do not understand him, their son who acts like an old man. He leaves home as soon as he can, aware that something is not quite right with him. He travels to London; stares in awe at James Eccleston’s grave. He meets his daughter again and breaks down in tears when she doesn’t recognize him.

He looks the same, but no matter how hard he insists, she doesn’t see the resemblance, doesn’t believe him. A stranger to his own child. The details he has on her life, her mother, her childhood scare her and soon after, Bucky is taken away by the constables. He spends the night in a cold cell, staring at the ceiling. By the time the sun rises, Bucky knows three things: the first one, he has lived two different lives already and he remembers them with specific details. The second one, his name and body are always similar. The last one, his wife is in the same circumstances as him. But she doesn’t remember anything from her past lives. She doesn’t remember him.

The prospects of an ability such as this one scare him as much as they excite him. He vows to find her and tell her the truth, so that they can relish in their luck as much as they can.

But when he meets her, selling fish on the docks of Brighton, she is married. He tries to explain everything, from their everlasting love to their immortality.

She believes Bucky is mad and calls for her husband, staring at him with frightened eyes.

For two years, he follows her and tries to persuade her to see the truth. She never does. The husband finally snaps one night and stabs him in the gut with a kitchen knife. Bucky bleeds out in a quiet street, among the trash. His only relief is that he was the one to die first, this time: he won’t have to face a world where she is no longer alive.

* * *

Bucky is born four more times. The son of a preacher in 1573, the last child of a family of farmers in 1632, an orphan in 1651 and the prized heir to an ancient and noble house in 1735.

He starts over with all that life has to offer, from family to friends, passing by education and love. The only constant is her. He waits for years for the moment when their eyes meet, for the feel of her lips against his and the sound of her laughter. Every minute of her absence is agony and he is torn between the grief of her death and the expectancy of her return.

But despite the joy, the love, the lust… Bucky grows tired. For three centuries, he has lived, and endured more pain that he could possibly imagine. The love he has for his wife is too intense, too fierce. Her inevitable death hurts too much and he has had enough. When he gives his last breath in his manor, at 84 years old, he decides his next life will be different.

* * *

He opens his eyes in New Orleans in 1735, the son of a French general. His entire childhood is spent ignoring his dreams and memories, doing everything in his power to stop himself from falling once again in the loop. He falls in love with a maid, a stable boy, an actress…all of them as different as can be from her. It never lasts long, but Bucky prefers it that way, the freedom of celibacy. He feels free, for the first time in three hundred years.

He meets her just after his thirty-fifth birthday. The cousin of his best-friend, moving to the city after her mother’s passing. She’s sweet and kind, yet as fierce and passionate as she was before. He feels himself weakening day by day, the lovely sound of her laughter echoing through his head for hours after they part.

And Bucky is furious.

‘James,’ she calls one day as they sit in the garden. Oliver had already left, chasing after the baker’s daughter like a lovesick fool. It’s just the two of them under the shade of an oak.

‘What?’ he replies in a voice harsher than he meant.

His head is resting against the trunk of the tree, his eyes closed. He tries to make it look as if he is about to fall asleep. In truth, he just can’t bear to look at her.

‘Do you like me?’

His eyes snap open. She’s blushing, embarrassed, and her hands are twisting the material of her dress nervously.

‘It’s just, you’re always so…cold with me,’ she stammers. ‘But then, you stare at me like…like the other boys do. The ones who like me. And you always leave the room when we’re alone, but I know you hit Thomas the other day.’

Bucky bristles at the memory. He had tried not to react, but when he’d heard the way that idiot talked about her, he’d snapped. His knuckles were still bruised, but still, he couldn’t bring himself to regret what he’d done.

‘You know how I feel about you,’ she continued, her voice stronger. ‘You’re not an idiot, and I was never subtle. I didn’t see the use, really. I thought you might return my feelings, but the more time passes, the more I have doubts. So if you do not love me, say it. I’d rather you crush my hopes now than play with them for the rest of my life.’

His chest tightens and Bucky feels like the worst jerk in the world. She won’t cry, but he knows her, knows she wants to. She’ll bite the inside of her cheeks hard enough to draw blood if that’s what it takes, but she won’t show weakness.

And it’s hard, so hard to restrain himself from grabbing her and pulling her against his chest, touching her for the first time in decades. He wants to brush his lips against every inch of her skin, learn once more the curves of her body. Oh, how he missed the sight of her in his bed, the sound of her voice as she said ‘I love you’, the sensation of her nails scraping down his back.

He wants to see her round with child again, watch as she sings their baby back to sleep. They lost so many children to time already. Their faces haunt his sleep like ghosts, whispering their names in his ear. He loves them as much as he hates them, those remnants of the past. He knows she is the only one who can make it stop hurting, the only one who can make being a father worth it.

And yet, as he stares at her distraught face, he knows he can’t cave in. He is exhausted, and it needs to stop.

‘I do not love you,’ he says and he will remember the pain in her eyes for the rest of his lives.

She leaves New Orleans a week later, without saying goodbye. He’s relieved, at first. Without her near, he isn’t as tempted as he was before. He spends two years squabbling his parents’ money, screwing anyone who showed him interest and drinking far too much than he ought to.

It doesn’t take him long to realize there is a gap in his chest that won’t be filled by anyone, no matter how hard they try. No matter how much he wants them to. A gap shaped like her. At night, he stares at the canopy, his heart filled with questions. He wants her back. But every time he thinks he’ll go and find her, a new distraction comes around and he puts it back to the next day. What harm is there in waiting a little? Their love is everlasting. She can wait.

One day, Oliver knocks at his door with a dark look in his eyes. Bucky’s heart starts hammering in his chest the moment he looks upon his friend’s face.

‘She’s dead,’ he says and Bucky’s world collapses. He goes back to his room without another word, leaving Oliver on the threshold. He doesn’t make it to the bed. His legs fail him and he falls down on the wooden floor. Pain radiates through his body but he barely feels it over the agony in his chest. And the guilt, God, the guilt is destroying him.

He failed her. He loves her, has loved her for hundreds of years and she has always been there for him. And yet, he abandoned her. He’s thirty-eight years old, and this is no longer the fifteenth century. He will live a long life: the fast progress of medicine these past years will ensure it. Decades without her; without the woman who is everything to him.

He can’t stand it.

Three hours later, Oliver Campbell forces the door of his friend James’ house and finds him dead, a gun in his hand.

* * *

Bucky’s next life begins with thoughts of her. She’s all he dreams about, her name echoes in his head and he draws her every time he fears he’s forgetting details about her face. He leaves home as soon as he can and travels the world, searching for her. A year passes. Then five. Ten. Twenty years, and still nothing. He celebrates his fiftieth birthday on his own, in a dingy hotel in St Petersburg. He has no money left, but still he keeps looking. She’s here somewhere, she has to be. They are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other.

Bucky dies at seventy-four years old, alone under a bridge in Paris. He never found her.

* * *

He is born once again as James Martin. His parents are teachers, good, honest people who strive to live a happy, quiet life. But it doesn’t take them long to realize something is deeply wrong with their child. Bucky doesn’t cry as a baby. He doesn’t laugh or smile either. He just stares numbly, barely moving at all. He grows up a sickly child, distant from everyone else. His parents send him to numerous doctors, but they have no answer for them.

Bucky should care. But he doesn’t. How could he, when the world has no meaning anymore? She was the only thing that mattered, the only one who made his lives worthwhile. The world had lost its colours and Bucky now lived in a nightmare.

He has rejected her, for the first time in eight lifetimes. And now, she’s gone. God has taken her from him. A part of him can’t help but feel he has deserved it. He has been cocky, so confident in their immortality he’d felt he could play with his fate. And now, he is paying the price.

He is condemned to live out his lives, without her by his side. For all of eternity.

* * *

James Martin dies and James Buchanan Barnes is born, on the 10th of March 1917. He is resigned to his fate from the start, and decides the best he can do is to try and live his lives the best he can, like she would have wanted him to. He meets Steve Rogers, a skinny kid who lives across the street from the apartment he shares with his parents and sister.

Steve has a heart as big as New York and is the bravest man Bucky has ever met in the five centuries he has spent on this planet. Steve reminds him of her, the woman he’s lost, and their friendship is instantaneous. They do everything together, from fighting bullies to wooing girls. Bucky isn’t happy, but Steve makes the pain bearable.

It doesn’t last. Mankind hasn’t seen enough bloodshed after World War One, and before he can blink, Bucky’s on a ship to Great Britain, side by side with frightened boys who’ve never held a rifle in their hands before.

Bucky’s good at it. At war. He can kill men without blinking, set out bombs without hesitation and handle anything that’s thrown at him. At night, as he lays under whatever cover he could find, he feels sick. It isn’t supposed to be this easy, killing people. What kind of man is talented at slaughtering human beings?

He gets captured with the 107th infantry by Nazis and taken to a base behind enemy line. He knows he has no chance of making it out alive. He just wants it to be over. He will miss Steve the most, that dumb punk who couldn’t give up anything even if it meant he’d get hurt.

But Bucky doesn’t die. One night, a small man with round glasses comes and inspects them all like livestock. He points his pudgy finger at Bucky, who is knocked out before he can say “no”.

The torture is the worst pain he has ever endured. He mumbles his serial number, name and rank over and over again, staring at the ceiling at the doctor pokes and prods at him. When the pain gets too much to bear, he thinks of her. His love. He thinks of the way she looked when she slept, curled up under the covers. He thinks of the sound of her voice in the morning, a little rougher than it usually was. He thinks of seeing her again, a guardian angel come to save him from the war.

But the angel that does come isn’t her. It’s Steve, taller and bigger and wielding a red, white and blue shield. Captain America, they call him now. The nation’s saviour. Bucky never sees a hero when he looks at Steve. He sees a punk from Brooklyn, like he always has.

And he follows that punk into battle, make it his mission to keep his friend alive at all costs. He doesn’t imagine the cost could be this, though.

The fall from the train isn’t the worst part. Losing his arm isn’t, either. The worst part is losing his soul. He doesn’t remember most of what they did to him, under that mountain in Germany. He recalls pain, mostly. And being cold.

They wipe him. Rip every memory from him. Even her. He forgets her name, her face, the feeling of her skin under his fingers. He forgets his lives, his long-lost children, the countless people he’s loved.

He becomes a machine. A warrior, whose only reason to be is to kill. The Winter Soldier.

His life is a cacophony of screams, gunshots and the ever-present whirring of his metal arm. Half the time, he doesn’t know the people he kills. He doesn’t seem to care. He murders a couple in 1991, on a dirt road at night. The woman doesn’t fight him as he chokes her, staring at her husband’s dead body. They ask him to assassinate a nuclear engineer once, but a Russian spy with flaming red hair gets there before him. She does her best to protect the man, covering his trembling form with her body. He doesn’t hesitate before shooting him, straight through her stomach. She collapses with a scream, but Bucky is already gone.

Everything that makes him human has disappeared. He doesn’t remember being immortal either. If he had, he would have shot himself in the head as soon as he could. Get it over with. But Bucky doesn’t remember it, doesn’t remember anything: and so, his last mean of escape is gone.

Bucky is trapped.

* * *

It’s 2017. Bucky sips at his coffee, and tries to clear his mind. It never does well to linger on the past. Steve saved him, the Winter Soldier’s behind him now and the only reminder of that time is his metal arm. The memories have returned, and with them, the pain and the loneliness. But it’s better this way. He prefers the suffering over feeling nothing at all.

The small coffee shop is crowded, people talking and laughing all around him. It’s loud, but Bucky doesn’t mind. It makes him feel less alone.

He hears light footsteps approach his table. Putting his cup down, he raises his head. And his heart stops.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman says, unaware of the storm raging in Bucky’s head. ‘Is this seat free?’

Bucky takes a deep breath and gives her a trembling smile.

‘Always.’


	2. To Hope and Cherish

‘Always,’ he says, and there is a weight to the word that never was before.

She doesn’t hear it, doesn’t see the way he looks at her, doesn’t sense the change in the atmosphere. She sits, that’s all. Folds her legs under the table and pulls out a phone with a cracked screen from her purse. Her eyes are glued to the device, her fingers moving with astounding speed as she plays some colourful game. Occasionally, she will take a sip from her coffee.

Is it a coffee, though? She has always hated the bitterness of that particular beverage. It has to be hot chocolate, he thinks, and from the smell that soon wafts in the air, he is correct.

She doesn’t look at him, but he can’t take his eyes off her. Her hair is shorter than it used to be, matching the fashion of the twenty-first century. It’s dyed, but the shade is not that far off from the real one. It’s pretty. He spends an eternity studying the way the strands shine in the sunlight.

She has a scar on her cheek, shaped like the letter “w”. But Bucky is feeling poetic and decides instead that it resembles the constellation Cassiopeia. He has always liked the stars, those cold beauties shining down upon the world of men. In the centuries of her absence, he sometimes imagined she was up there, far, far away from him. But still watching.

Perhaps she was. Perhaps he wished for her return hard enough that she came to this world once again.

It’s obvious she doesn’t remember him. She never has, and he doesn’t see why this time would be any different. He used to resent it, this repeated amnesia of hers. But the weight of the centuries is a heavy burden, and Bucky now knows she is better off not knowing. He will carry the memories alone and treasure every new one. That is his fate, and in the back of his mind, he thinks that it’s not so bad. Not if it means that he can love her.

She slams her phone on the hard metal of the table and glares at him. Bucky is too caught up in his own thoughts, still staring at her face, to recognize the cold anger in her eyes.

‘Dude,’ she says, and God, how he had missed the sweet sound of her voice. ‘You’ve been staring at me for thirty minutes. What the hell?’

He is shocked, for a second, at the words that come out of her mouth. The last time he saw her, it was the eighteenth century. She had been high-born, raised to speak politely, respectfully, never saying a word above the other.

This is different. This is brash, and honest, and strong. A woman of her time, confident in her power. The sight is mesmerizing. It doesn’t help his case, when he only stares at her more.

‘I get it,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘You’re a creep. Bloody hell, can’t I have one day of peace in this fucking town?’

He laughs, delighted. He can’t help it. She’s  _rude_. She’s here, and she’s speaking to him, and she’s so rude. And British, too. He hadn’t expected that. They hadn’t been British since the sixteenth century. He had missed that accent on her tongue.

‘Stop looking at me like that!’ she snaps.

‘I’m sorry!’ he says, but he’s still laughing, and the words are distorted. ‘I’m so sorry, really.’

She raises an eyebrow, crossing her arms over her chest.

‘Whatever. Are you always this weird with women?’

‘No. I swear, I’m not.’

‘Oh, am I an exception, then? Joy!’ she says, the sarcasm heavy in her words.

Bucky forces himself to calm down, and his laughter stops. He’s still grinning, though. He can’t help it. Miracles tend to do that to a man.

‘I’m Bucky,’ he says. He doesn’t hold out his hand. He has an inkling she wouldn’t shake it if he did.

‘Okay,’ she answers. ‘Are you a creep, Bucky?’

‘No, ma’am. I don’t believe so.’

Her eyebrows shoot up at the “ma’am”, but she doesn’t look displeased. Surprised, perhaps. A bit flattered. He stores the information in a corner of his head, vows to use it to his advantage. This time, he will do things properly. He will sweep her off her feet, use all the charm he has, every trick he learned over the years. She won’t see it coming.

But not yet. Not when she still looks at him like she’s debating calling the police. Winning her trust is his priority.

‘I apologize,’ he says, and this time, makes sure his voice is serious. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. You just reminded me of someone.’

‘Who?’

‘Someone I lost,’ he answers and the pain filters in his voice. She shivers, dropping her gaze to her folded hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

Bucky smiles, shaking off the memories. She’s here, now. That’s all that counts.

‘It’s alright. It’s been a long time. May I know your name?’

She hesitates and gives him a fake name. He doesn’t hold it against her. He’s a stranger in a café, and this isn’t the safest part of the city. He’s glad she’s being careful. He would have been more worried if she’d told him the truth.

‘I’ve seen your face somewhere,’ she muses. ‘I’m sure of it.’

His heart starts hammering in his chest, and he dares hope for a second that she remembers their past lives. But reality catches up to him soon enough. His past as the Winter Soldier has made him rather well-known. No doubt she has seen him on the news, some years ago.

‘Maybe I just have one of those faces,’ he says.

She hums.

‘Nice try, but no. Are you famous?’

‘Infamous would be more exact.’

Her eyes twinkle. There it is, her thirst for the unknown, her taste for danger, her love for mysteries. She won’t let go of him, now, not until she has an answer. She’s like a dog with a bone, and he is beyond pleased that this side of her has survived time.

‘Will you give me a clue?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Think of it as a challenge.’

‘What makes you think I have the patience for it?’

‘Just a feeling,’ he says and laughs.

She raises an eyebrow, watching as his laughter slowly dies done.

‘You are a strange man, Bucky. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.’

‘Can’t it be both?’

It’s her turn to laugh, then. Bucky nearly bursts out crying at the sound. He hasn’t heard her laugh in over two hundred years. The sound pierces him like a bullet, ripping through flesh and bone. She doesn’t see the way his eyes cloud with tears, and he forces himself to calm down before she can. He will break down, later. Alone. Now is not the time for tears.

‘I suppose it can,’ she says, smirking at him. ‘Alright, Bucky. I accept your challenge. What’s my reward if I win?’

‘Depends,’ he says. ‘If you’re not running for the hills when you figure out who I am, then it can be anything you want.’

‘Anything?’ she repeats, and he doesn’t miss the way she ignored the rest of his answer. No, she truly hasn’t changed.

‘Anything,’ he confirms.

‘I’ll hold you to that,’ she says, and this time, he does thrust his hand forward.

She shakes it, firmly. A good handshake, the kind that impresses CEOs and soldiers alike. He barely notices it. How could he, when her skin his warm and soft and he can almost feel her pulse with the tip of his fingers. It’s the final proof, the final sign that she is  _here_ , she is  _alive_.

She has returned to him, and Bucky vows never to let her go again.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t. Two weeks later, she finds him in the café and says his name. James Barnes rolls off her tongue, and while his first name is a comfort, his surname feels bitter. She knows who he is. She knows what he has done. And while most of the world had been content to forgive and forget, largely due to Steve’s influence, there were some who still wished to see him hang.

She doesn’t. She lays a hand on his shoulder, the metal hard underneath his clothes and apologizes for everything that was done to him. It’s a shock. It takes him quite a while to breathe, and even longer to speak. She waits, patiently, sipping her chocolate as he regains his bearings.

‘Thank you,’ he says at last, his voice raw and vulnerable.

‘Nah,’ she answers flippantly. ‘Thank  _you_. My grandad fought during the war, you know? The Howling Commandoes saved him, in France. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you.’

Bucky inhales sharply, awed.

‘What was his name?’ he chokes out.

She tells him. He doesn’t know it. She waves off his apologies, telling him that her grandfather had never introduced himself. Why would anyone remember him, a mere face among the crowd? Bucky is still angry at himself. This is her grandfather, her family, her blood. He should have remembered.

‘Let’s not talk about the past, yeah?’ she says, and the brightness of her smile is enough to pull him away from the memories. ‘I believe I am owed a reward.’

‘You are. Ask away.’

‘Would it be too poetic if I asked you for the moon?’

Bucky laughs, leaning back in his chair. She had asked him that same question many times before. She would never remember, but he gave her the same answer he always had.

‘If that’s what you want, I will give you the moon, and all the stars in the sky.’

‘Nah,’ she says with a frown. ‘Imagine how dark it would be.’

‘What do you want then?’

She grins, and gestures at the counter, where the barista is hard at work.

‘How about another chocolate, for a start?’

 

* * *

 

He takes his time getting to know her, delights in every new and old side of her personality. The good, the bad, the things in between, he takes it all and holds it close. He loves her. He loves her more than he ever has, that impossible woman. He treasures every second in her company, and hungers for more when she is away.

Slowly, she opens up. She tells him of her family, of her mother who smokes like a chimney and her father who enjoys his fishing boat more than his own wife. She has a dog, a pitiful mop that she loves to pieces. Her brother is a little shit, as all younger brothers are. The scar on her cheek, that constellation he spends eternities gazing at, she got in a car accident when she was nine.

She talks for hours, and Bucky drinks every word as if it was water in the desert. She has an opinion on  _everything_ , something that he finds out when she spends an entire afternoon debating with the barista on which doctor was the best, between David Tennant and Matt Smith. It’s Tennant,  _of course it’s Tennant_ , she tells him and the fire in her eyes quickly convinces him to agree.

She isn’t perfect. He learns that too. She is impatient, and rude, and can hold a grudge for ages. Her anger is something to behold, but often undeserved. She holds herself to impossible standards and is bitterly disappointed at every failure. She’s lonely. So lonely.

‘They’re on the other side of the country, you see,’ she tells him on a rainy afternoon. ‘I’d love to visit, but I don’t have the money. My brother is always travelling, too. I haven’t seen him in a year.’

She says it flippantly, but there is pain and longing in her eyes. As much as she likes to critic her family, she loves them, and it breaks Bucky’s heart to see her like this. She looks like a lost child, under the harsh lights of the café.

‘You know, I’ve got resources,’ he says, and her eyes grow cold. ‘I’m kind of an Avenger? We’ve got a jet, you could-’

‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ she seethes.

His words turn to ash in his mouth. He can only watch as her face pales in anger and her hands clench around her empty cup.

‘Who the hell do you think I am?’ she snaps. ‘A charity case? Some lost cause you can pick up to make you feel better? Fuck you, Barnes.’

She doesn’t bother to speak quietly. The costumers, the barista, hell, even the cat is looking at him. She knows it, too. She delights in it. This is her, too, that cruelty. It’s never pleasant to deal with, but it’s part of her, just as much as the rest.

She stands and leaves the café, walking out into the rain without looking back. Bucky, alone inside, closes his eyes and prays.

 

* * *

 

Their spat doesn’t last. Three days later, she’s crying with laughter as he weaves a tale that is half-memory, half-lie. They’re in the park, eating the chocolate cake she baked as an apology. She used to do that before, too. He never told her he hates chocolate cakes with a fiery passion. He never will.

‘And that’s how Steve ended up punching the mayor’s son in the face,’ Bucky finishes, and she is laughing so hard she’s turning red, gasping for breath in between peals of laughter. It isn’t a good look, but he loves her anyway.

It takes her some time to calm down. When she does, she lies down. He does the same, stretching out besides her. They look at the canopy of trees above their heads and play “Count the Squirrels.” When Bucky reaches five, she leans over him and kisses him. As simple as that. She was never one for futility.

He doesn’t commit the kiss to memory or recalls all the other times she’s kissed him before. For once, Bucky is firmly rooted to the present. They kiss, again, and again, and again, and he feels like he’s flying into the heart of a burning star.

They start dating, and Bucky falls back into a routine that is as familiar to him as breathing. There is the quick kiss when she slips away in the morning, the breathless one when she returns. There is the laughter that echoes around the room in front of the tv. The scratches on his skin and the bruises on his neck. The tears, too.

I love you, he says all the time. He says it to her when she sleeps, draws it into her bare skin, shouts it while she showers. She doesn’t understand why he says it so often, but some part of her realizes it’s important. She never fails to say it back. The words never seem to lose their meaning, their weight. That’s a relief. But then, Bucky never comes short of ways to express his love for her. He has fountains of words, centuries of books and poems stored away in his mind. She prefers to say it in gestures. In cookies left in the oven, in fog hearts on the mirror, in fleeting touches as he walks past her.

She meets Steve soon, and they get on famously. Bucky finds himself running after the two troublemakers, desperately trying to keep them alive. He doesn’t mind. It feels right. Natasha wants to eat her alive, Sam falls in love and Tony’s going insane, because  _of course Smith was better than Tennant, what is wrong with you, woman?_ Bucky actually prefers Eccleston, but he might be biased.

There is the first anniversary, the first double date, the first shared apartment. There is the many failed proposals, and the one that succeeds. There is the wedding, a quiet affair until Tony invites half of New York. There is the first pregnancy, the first miscarriage. There is the break up, and the make-up sex. There is the second pregnancy, and the cries of a new-born baby.

Bucky’s tears are hot on his cheeks when they hand him his daughter. She looks like the one he lost long ago in London, the one that didn’t remember him. For a second, he thinks of giving her the same name but quickly decides against it. It wouldn’t be fair. This is a new being, not a shadow of the past. She deserves a name of her own.

In the end, they name her Hope. It’s cheesy, and cliché, and it’s absolutely perfect.

 

* * *

 

Hope grows up. She is spoiled, of course she is. Dotted upon by the Avengers, adored by the world. Somehow, the Winter Soldier doesn’t seem so terrible when holding a child in his arms and Bucky lets go of the pains of the past, his daughter soothing the burn with bubbling laughter and bright smiles.

His sees his wife sing their child to sleep again, sees her soothe scratched knees and broken hearts. She was always the most beautiful when caring for their child, Bucky thinks. There is something breath-taking about the raw love in her eyes, the endless devotion in her voice.

Sometimes, Bucky will start crying without noticing. She never asks, somehow understanding that this is not something Bucky wishes to talk about. But she always dries his tears, and kisses him with a tenderness that makes his heart stop in his chest. I’m here, her lips say as they press against his skin. I’m here, and I’m never going away.

 

* * *

 

‘I know what I want,’ she tells him one night, as they’re lying in bed. ‘As my reward.’

He recalls that day in the café, the challenge, the moon she had jokingly asked for.

‘What is it?’ he asks, the solemnity of the moment casting a heavy weight in the room.

‘I want your forever,’ she says, and Bucky feels like crying.

‘You have it,’ he answers instead, the words rushed, and strong, and true. ‘You’ve always had it. You’ll always have it.’

‘Good,’ she says with a satisfied smile, settling back against his chest. She falls asleep soon after, her heart beating a steady rhythm under his hand.

Bucky lays awake for a long time, and thanks the stars for giving her back to him.


End file.
